Turn on the “caps lock” button before hitting “render”. This is one of the most easy and effective way to render compositions faster. Before rendering, simply press the “caps lock” button. This disables refresh and stops After Effects from redrawing and showing every frame it renders. You will no longer see your video frame by frame as it renders.

Close other programs while rendering. This is another a fairly easy concept to reduce render times. Running multiple programs takes more processing power and RAM. If you want to render a composition as quickly as possible, shut down all other programs outside of After Effects. If you need to multitask while rending, this will slow you down.

Trim footage that is off screen, set to 0% opacity, a scale of 0%, and any other setting where the footage is not being used/seen.Despite a layer appearing to not be in use, if the layer is not trimmed, After Effects has to calculate its properties. This then makes for longer renders. By making sure that layers are trimmed after they are no longer in use you can make rendering and RAM Previewing faster.